MR2

Just packed it up and sent it back, after 3 hours in an Air-conditioned office the base plate of the unit was too hot to touch, this is not a camera for our environment that regularly gets to 40+ degrees C.

Well, my E97 arrived.... so far:

1, It seems like a pretty soft image and is not that much of an improvement over a 3mp cam, still tweaking however.

2, this thing gets HOT it has a metal heatsink and even the plastic lens gets remarkably hot to touch

3, the frame rate is quite ordinary, they quote up to 6fps but I think we'd be lucky to see 1-2 fps, this is in fairly bright light too(outdoor, overcast day)

http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t370/mgoodwinmr2/10mpnative_zps7ec8872c.png

http://i1056.photobucket.com/albums/t370/mgoodwinmr2/10mpzoomed_zps136a5fd3.png

You will probably just have to try this for yourself. As a first approximation, the sensitivity at 940nm is probably about half that of 850nm.

Bingo, it's a big difference You can always bounce hidden 850nm lights off objects to light the area you're after

lol

easiest way to tell how much your grabbing is just to go look at the data files they have time of creation so you can see...

we generate 6gb of data an hour per cam with 3mp cam's at max res/max qual rec 24/7... 144gb a day

Should have their first one next Monday.

I look forward to your review!

it's nice to see 10mp becoming common, quite curious what the pricing vs Zoom quality will be like, I could go some of the 10mp to cover an area, or I can just go heaps of 3mp units that are considerably cheaper

this would be a steal bar the lack of night vision:

http://www.use-ip.co.uk/acti-e97-10mp-indoor-mini-dome-camera-with-basic-wdr-and-fixed-lens.html

http://www.acti.com/corpweb/CKKS/ProductMatrix/ProductMatrix.aspx

new interesting products, loving the upgrade to 10mp... Might have to trial a few if the price is right, wish it was more than 6fps though... 10 would make me quite happy.

i remember in the milestone training, that the storage needs to be formatted with a certain block size, i cant remember what that was, but ill check.

 

cheers

I'd be keen to see what the figures recommend....

I've sent plenty of emails to Milestone support without any recommendation coming back out of them.

if I split the disks into packs of two I'm not going to have enough storage (at the moment it's two arrays of 6 disks, so I have a whole 14 slots to play with) anyone think that 7200rpm 1tb's in mirrored pairs (but not striped) might be a better way to attack this without going ridiculous spending?

Hah! you guys with your ridiculous budgets... I'm Jealous.

going to try REFS for the file system and see if that helps, if not then change the host disk file system, if not then try splitting the disks into pairs of arrays (going to be messy but meh.)

Well, I got my Acti pricing back

E32 3mp 4.2mm Lens(62.7 Degree FOV), $350

E33 5mp 4.2mm Lens(63.7 Degree FOV), $420

E22V 5mp 2.8mm-12mm Lens(70.9 Degree FOV), $470

E24 3mp 2.8mm-12mm Lens (78.1 Degree FOV), $560

E42A 3mp 2.8mm-12mm Lens (70.5 Degre FOV) $650

E43A 5mp 2.8mm-12mm Lens (69.2 Degree FOV) $740

E62 3mp 2.8mm-12mm Lens (70.5 Degree FOV) $550

E63 5mp 2.8mm-12mm Lens (69.2 Degree FOV) $644

Not really feeling it

Back to the IPQ2232x

Network is OK, all these devices are connected to HP 5120's with 10gig backbones, when I do a copy/paste between shares I get nothing less than 100meg a sec, averaging 103/104meg start to finish

Copying from a Mirrored pair of drives operating as the system's boot to the first array & second arrays I'm getting 70-80 MB/Sec once it fills the cache

copying from the servers arrays to the NAS, just a file copy from one of the arrays to both of the NAS arrays at the same time I get a solid 55 MB/Sec(each)..

maybe a software issue, trying not to de-virtualize from 2012

Edit: just did another test where, rather than uploading a single large file for the test, I uploaded a whole pack of the Milestone files and the copy speed was the same as Milestone, so I guess it is array config, might try increasing the array block size or see what else I can do...

Indeed, that's why I want more info on what he's running

I'd love to run direct attached SAS but the price is right out there, I'm suspecting we're at the stage (if everything I'm doing is not working) that we split off to multiple servers and just keep each install/Server to 20 Camera's

there are many different types of host bus adapters, I'm curious which type he has

you can have Direct SAS attached, or have a FC attached NAS... after more info what he's doing

What method are you transporting the data to the NAS?

 

If your doing Ethernet that's your problem. We switched to HBA and all our troubles went away and been running for 2 years without a glitch.

Yep, Ethernet, so you went with what... ISCSI? Fiber Channel?

yeah wish I had the dollars for something with a separate controller, it's a NAS unit that's fairly beefy and I'm hoping splitting the disks works, if not then maybe we'll need a second NAS and split the arrays between NAS units.

whelp, my problem is I'm trying to figure out if I've out specced the server we have or not, we're at around 25 camera's and at the very least the disks appear to be struggling, the disk queue does not go particularly high however as mentioned the offload of data is slowing down...

I'm splitting our archive array from 11 drives in a Raid 5 to a pair of 8 drive raid 5 arrays, so with a bit of luck that'll speed it up enough

it is interesting, Milestone seems to dump the files as 2meg .PIC files, what does the core Avigilon data look like?

is anyone actually offloading to Nearline storage (7200rpm or lower) ? I've contemplated just dumping straight into the archive and avoid having to double handle the data.

I do however like the idea of the latest 4-6 hours of data being on faster disks to go back to recent events.

I'm curious if anyone's trying the SSD's? if so what ones and how's it going for you...

we're having issues where our normal 10k 146gb disks are struggling to be able to offload data fast enough to keep up with the incomming footage, the incomming network traffic is averaging 250 Mbps, the outgoing peaks at 310 to 330 Mbps...

the problem with SSD's is I can see the wear rate being an issue?

Yep, I agree with everything you've written, problem I find is I'm really not seeing any improvement on the 5mp over the 3mp, as you say that's likely to be a Lens issue...

guess we wait to see what happens, are they really doing that wonderful a job on the Len's that we'll be able to make any use of 10mp on a 1/3" sensor? sound nuts to me.

http://www.a1securitycameras.com/acti-e33.html

the full sized image does not really look that much better than our 3mp ones maybe I'll wait for the 10mp to see how things look, such a small sensor though...

what's the largest sensor they can actually use a CS/C lens with?

The best buy for a 5MP is the new ACTi E96 fisheye for $260ish. If you want a bullet or dome with IR, then $300 may not be enough, maybe the ACTi E33 or E73.

Funny you should mention that, was just hunting through your reviews and found the Acti E33, it looks like what we're after, just need to find a good (cheap) source

Anyone played around with some 5mp cam's (cheap sub $300 jobbies) that actually give you an increase in quality over the 3mp cam's that are out there?

I've bought a few 5mp Cam's and so far the image is actually sharper and better on the 3mp cam's we have so I'm at a loss... after something that is stable in Milestone

yeah man, I'm super keen to try the Dahua with 30x zoom on a 2mp

Just to give an update. I was able to get a Samsung SNP-3350 for $350. Granted it is not HD, but with 33x optical zoom & PTZ the trade off is just about right. It's also not POE but I can just run the cable... I also got a few accessories for it(housing, etc) which cost another 200 or so dollars so I spent quite a penny.

 

To be honest, I never thought these things can shoot up in price the way they did but I did learn a lot of security cameras. Thank you all.

I've always found it funny that Analog stuff has higher Zoom than Digital, they need to hurry up and catch up

I've got a couple of fixed 1080p 4mm cams that give me a 140 degree view, and they're an OK substitute for a PTZ at a low price, but they definitely don't give the resolution a PTZ would in an area of interest. Once you get past 30' or so out, they just don't have the pixels per foot to give "id-the-perp" quality images.

 

This is the standard trade-off of coverage vs resolution, of course.

 

I also don't like how the images split my front coverage right in the middle, as that's where things are often going on, so I not only get lower ppf at the edges, but overall lower image quality compared to the center.

 

I'm thinking about adding a 3rd cam and switching them to 2.8 mm lenses (or whatever the numbers work out to), which would be approaching the cost of an inexpensive PTZ, though it would give me that full-time panoramic coverage at better resolution, and would give me a single view of my center coverage.

Honestly if you need a 180 degree view I'd go with 4 x cam's each with a 60 degree lens, though rather than a 1080p camera I'd be after a 3mp minimum (we get them for around the $200 mark, look at the Dahua) ideally a 5mp that are getting cheap now too)

of course you will not get the zoomed in view quality of a good PTZ zoomed right in, but what are your chances of the PTZ being pointed at exactly the right position/right zoom level for each event? in most scenario's I can think of it's a low chance.